Traveling to Paris

Paris, 14 July 1789.

The Bastille is burning.

The sky over the Faubourg Saint-Antoine is the same red as Natasha’s hair.

She arrived three weeks earlier, on a Dutch herring boat that stank of salt and revolution.

Official name: Comtesse Natacha de Rostoptchine, émigrée from Moscow, fleeing “Catherine’s tyranny.”

Real name: Black Widow.

Mission: keep France burning long enough for Russia to finish the Turks without Austrian help.

Method: make every man who could stop the chaos fall in love with ****… and with her.

She rented the top floor of a crumbling hôtel particulier on Rue Saint-Honoré, directly opposite the workshop where Desmoulins prints *Révolutions de Paris*.

At night the printing presses thundered like artillery beneath her bed.

She fucked to that rhythm.

First target: Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau.

The lion of the Assembly, voice of the Third Estate, cock like a revolutionary cannon.

She met him at the Palais-Royal, under the arcades where whores and philosophers mixed like absinthe and water.

He recognized her instantly (Catherine had sent him her portrait years ago as a joke).

He laughed when she whispered, “Tonight I defect to France, monsieur. Between your sheets.”

His apartment stank of ink, brandy, and smallpox scars.

He tore her gown with his teeth, lifted her onto the desk still covered with speeches, and took her standing—rough, urgent, papers flying like startled doves.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, bit his shoulder until she tasted blood, and came screaming the *Marseillaise* before it even had a name.

While he was still inside her, pulsing, she slipped the tiny vial from her garter and poured a single drop of essence of hemlock onto her own tongue.

She kissed him deep, fed him **** flavored with her cunt.

He died mid-thrust, eyes wide, cock still buried in her, roaring her name like a battle cry.

One.

Second target: Georges-Jacques Danton.

Voice like a church bell, hands that could crush a skull or caress a breast with equal tenderness.

She found him in the Cordeliers club, drunk on liberty and red wine.

She wore a tricolor cockade between her breasts and nothing else under the crimson cape.

He carried her to the back room, laid her on a table sticky with spilled wine, and licked her from throat to cunt like a starving man at communion.

She came on his tongue while the club sang outside, then flipped him over, straddled his face, and rode him until his beard was soaked and his eyes rolled back.

When he begged to be inside her, she guided that massive cock into her ass—slow, deliberate, every inch a declaration of war.

She fucked him until he sobbed, until he swore he would burn Versailles himself if she asked.

Then she reached between them, found the second vial taped beneath her breast, and painted the head of his cock with nightshade just before he came.

He died erupting inside her, seed and poison mixing, body arched like a bow drawn for the last time.

Two.

Last and most dangerous: Maximilien Robespierre.

The Incorruptible.

The one man in Paris who did not fuck.

She spent a week becoming his shadow.

Wore simple white muslin, no rouge, hair in a severe knot.

Attended every session of the Jacobins, eyes lowered, taking notes like a virtuous republican maid.

He noticed her on the eighth day.

“You write like a man who has seen ****,” he said.

“I have seen it,” she answered. “I have tasted it.”

That night she came to his rooms on Rue Saintonge.

He opened the door in shirt-sleeves, candle in hand, looking like a saint about to be martyred.

She did not speak.

She simply knelt, unbuttoned his breeches, and took him in her mouth—slow, reverent, the way one takes communion.

He tried to push her away (virtue, virtue) but she swallowed him to the root, hummed the *Ça ira* around his cock until his knees buckled.

She laid him on his narrow bed, the one he claimed he never used for sin.

She rode him gently, almost tenderly, whispering the Declaration of the Rights of Man against his lips while her cunt clenched around him in perfect 4/4 time.

He came with tears in his eyes, calling her “citoyenne” and “goddess” and “France.”

She waited until his heartbeat slowed, then leaned close.

“Incorruptible?” she whispered. “Let’s see.”

She slid the thin stiletto from her hairpin and pushed it up under his ribs, straight into the heart, while still impaled on him.

His last orgasm was also his **** spasm—hips jerking, eyes locked on hers, blood bubbling on his lips like revolutionary champagne.

Three.

At dawn on 14 July, she stood on the roof of her house and watched the Bastille fall.

The air stank of gunpowder and freedom.

Between her thighs she still felt the ghosts of three dead men.

She opened the lacquered box she had carried from Moscow.

Inside, wrapped in tricolor silk: Mirabeau’s scarred tongue, Danton’s broken finger, Robespierre’s perfect, bloodless ear.

She kissed each trophy, then tossed them one by one into the flames below.

When the box was empty, she pissed on the ashes—golden stream sparkling in the morning light—then turned west.

Next stop: Vienna.

Emperor Joseph was dying, and his sister Marie-Antoinette still had a pretty neck.

But first, Paris.

She walked naked through the smoking streets, red hair flying like a banner, breasts painted with gunpowder and blood, laughing as the people cheered the wrong woman.

They thought she was Liberty.

She was something older.

She was the Widow.

And France was now her widow too.